tef

bad poster & mediocre photographer

  • they/them

if there's any cheap moral to the mario 64 collision detection story, it's this: draw your hit boxes in the dev build. (edit: let's be clear, i don't mean the sm64 authors)

then again, if it wasn't for bugs like this we'd never have so much fun with backwards long jumping, so maybe we need to embrace jank


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in reply to @tef's post:

oh man could the n64 even do transparent surfaces at the time

also i'm not sure the plane hitboxes actually physically existed, so you'd have a hard time doing that unless you knew about this phenomenon already

honestly im just kinda flabbergasted about how strange the collision system is. like i dont know what i expected, but the 4 different types of collision constantly fighting against each other constantly, in a systemic battle where the slightest error in level authoring causes mystery collision errors? it's both elegant and insane, from a modern POV anyways. couldnt imagine how anyone would have conceptualised it all back then

i don't find it that strange

  • it's far faster to compute "am i above a floor" than store a 3d lookup table
  • storing sorted lists when comparing maximums is another easy optimisation
  • having ceilings extend up is easier than adding new objects inside every convex shape in a level, and then you're just extending up from a different point and can hit the same bugs

the problem isn't the method, really

the problem is that some co-ordinates are a few pixels off, some models don't have a triangle to cover a gap, and some of the positions aren't sorted, and discrete math does no-one any favours

in a more modern engine, you'd still have points being off, you'd still have gaps in models, and even then, you still get weird collision bugs.

sure enough, these are the sorts of bugs that, given enough time, are easy to shake out, especially with the right diagnostic tools

... but not every gamedev has the luxury of time

oh yeah im not disagreeing with the optimisations involved, im just a little bit stunned at the approach of physics, (which someone else mentioned is probably derived from someone at nintendo from physics first principles) in the context of someones whos only understanding of physics in games is in modern context, where its kinda a black box you just shove collisions into and it kinda works.